Review: This is What Happy Looks Like

Rating: 3.5 stars
Author: Jennifer E. Smith
Genre: YA Romance
Publisher: Headline
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More of a 3.5 rating. I really liked the beginning of this book. It started off gangbusters-- I was pulled right into the writing and the characters. I think beginning the book with emails was a great move, different and interesting. Smith does a nice job with the movie star meets and falls in love with-one-of-the-common-folk trope. Graham and Ellie were both very three-dimensional characters. The setting, a small coastal town in Maine was gorgeously done. 

In other books where the hero is a famous person, I've never really "gotten" why it was so rough to be in their shoes. I usually think, yes it sucks that they are being chased around by the press and that they have to live under a microscope, but really, wasn't that what they signed up for when they decided to become celebrities? With Graham though I could understand how he was feeling and why he was feeling this way. The fame just sort of snuck up on him all of a sudden. One thing led to another and suddenly, sort of without warning he was famous-- and lonely and isolated. I really felt for him. 

Ellie...well I felt for her as well, but not as much as Graham. I understand the "secret" bad idea, and why she felt she had to keep it a secret, but it got old for me pretty quick. After her first angst filled decision to back away from Graham and his fame for personal reasons I was behind her, but when she kept doing it, again and again, it got old. 

The reason that this book got demoted from a five-star read to a three point five star was that even though Graham and Ellie came to really understand each other by the end and got their happily ever of a sort, but I didn't really feel it. There was something lacking the whole last half of the book with regard to their connection. After their first encounter and all their emails, I was expecting them not to be so typically teen-angsty, all muddled in their own emotions. In the last half of the book, they kept finding reason after reason why they couldn't see each other and had to keep rushing off to deal with other things in their lives. The things they were dealing with, especially Ellie, were no doubt important, but it seemed to detract rather than add to the central plot which was the story between Ellie and Graham. I guess I got the rationale for why the author included these things, but it wasn't the direction that I thought the story should go in. It stopped being the happy little love story and tried to go in a different direction-- one that I just wasn't feeling.

Just the same it was a pleasant little read and I recommend it.